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Sports media is certainly changing.

ESPN used to be the king, but it was a false crown because it was based on people being forced to pay for the channel as part of cable packages, those days are rapidly coming to an end now that consumers are able to pick exactly what channels they want, and they don't seem to want ESPN. Tons of layoffs today and it's not likely to get any better as they continue to shed subscribers while on the hook for massive TV rights deals.

The same can be said for legacy media across the board, the national news types are still incredibly arrogant, but people are not paying attention, or maybe just do not think they are credible any longer.

Our local sports talk radio peeps seem quite willing to go down with the ship as they continue to grind out the same pathetic product which is seemingly far inferior to sports talk in other cities where ratings are much higher.

Wondering what the future will be, all podcasts, team run outlets, still think the betting entities come in and prop things up as they have a vested interest in sports being made available to the general public.

We are seeing a rather seismic change in the way sports media functions, newspapers dying, sports talk radio shrinking, and now national brands declining, wonder if the incredible rights fees we are seeing now will soon be a thing of the past.

The best era of ESPN was when it was a mix of plucky ex-weekend local sports anchors (personified by Chris Berman and Bob Ley) who understood how to utilize a growing stable of poached sportswriters (Le Batard was one of the last of them that they hired).

I first got cable when I moved to suburban Boston in 1994. ESPN programming was a revelation. The Sports Reporters was a less cheesy and more organized version of our local Chicago staple, the SportsCenter anchors were mostly sharp and funny (this was the era of the Mod Squad at 6 Eastern with Bob Ley, Robin Roberts, and Charley Steiner), and most of the pre/post ex-coaches were pretty good.

They had money from cable subscribers to lure the best newspaper talent (Bob Ryan, Tony Kornheiser, Mike Lupica, SICP's poster child Michael Ray Wilbon) who could put together interesting and thoughtful discussion; the legend was that PTI was just moving Kornheiser and Wilbon's endless newsroom arguments at the Washington Post into a studio and putting a timer on it and some commercials around it.

They they ran out of newspaper people and local TV talent to hire. Dan Le Batard was the last good one, and he both exhilarated them and frightened them. And so they started hiring people without journalistic backgrounds who could talk a lot and say things to generate debate with each other, but the insights were neither interesting nor insightful. And the death spiral, weighed down by insane rights fees and being egged on by increasing cord cutting.

And now Dan Patrick and Rich Eisen have massive market share both on small town radio networks and on mainstream streaming services. They both mix in some entertainment industry guests nearly daily, usually in their last hour. They both heavily involve their producers. Patrick's key interviews are usually available on YT by dinner, and Eisen runs his show on a perpetual streaming loop every three hours for anyone with a Roku box - in fact I will throw it on in about five minutes while I go through a week's worth of snail mail to find the two bills in three pounds of junk mail.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

GWGB

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TLDR

PTI keeps chugging pretty much the same since it started. The only thing other than live games I watch on ESPN anymore. Sunday mornings The Sports Reporters is long gone. Woke Around the Horn has been utterly destroyed.

Numerous sports media peeps decided several years ago that they would begin to sprinkle in a bit of political commentary during their shows, some are capable of pulling this off, but many, especially the former athletes who are only really there because they were really good at their sport, just look and sound silly.

It quickly devolved into a type of litmus test all the hosts had to pass, you must adapt to a particular political philosophy or you were gone.

Would venture to say a few of them saw this as a chance to branch off into the left wing media echo chamber, and why not, you get to hobnob with all the entertainment types, get invited to the best parties, can see why guys like Olbermann jumped at the chance to make a bit more coin playing the part of the angry white SJW, beats trying to pull thoughts from idiotic jocks all day long.

The problem is that they were willing to ignore the old business concept about not offending half of your potential customers, which in the end will bite them in the ass as the cool and trendy SJW fad will go away and a sizable portion of the potential audience will never come back to your product.

PC & SJW will get worse. Not going away in sports media.

ex-ESPN employees are 2nd only to former Howard Stern show guys in continued on-air querulous umbrage w/r/t their fmr employers. Bill Simmons does this shit too. Unnecessary, unseemly, uninteresting. Don't these guys have wives to air their grievances about their current or former bosses to? We don't wanna hear it. Talk sports, not shit.

This is what I keep wondering about. Those massive cable contracts are a thing of the past. Your football and ball and stick sports playoff rights will keep going up but doesn't the value of a 162 game or 82 game cable or streaming deal have to be worth less due to fewer viewers? And the vast majority of kids today are just watching highlights on their phones.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

not sure what ESPN's demise has to do with the value of broadcast rights for the various leagues. One ESPN goes under, there's an Amazon/Apple/Hulu/whomever waiting to bid increasingly outrageous sums in their place. Some of these platforms might even be loss-leadering their bids for say the NFL: paying more than they could possibly recoup on the rights themselves to draw eyeballs to their platform to generate other revenue streams.

It's been said for going on a decade now but more true than ever that live sports is the one type of broadcast advertisers have some reasonable certainly 90% of the audience is actually viewing the ads. Tivo'd TV shows and other timeshiftable content can't guarantee eyeballs to advertisers. Plus the highlight/excerpt thing and replays is why you see advertisers paying huge amounts to throw a badge in the upper corner or on the score graphic along the bottom--so that even when watched on House of Highlights or wherever people are still getting exposed to their branding.

Individual golfers still act as independent contractors (for the most part) and cut their own deals for hat/bag/shirt branding. We'll see if that continues now that they're all just paid concubines in some saudi prince's harem.

It does seem that anything limiting your products exposure will eventually have some type of impact on sales, realize that there will always be people that think of themselves as the smartest person in any room they walk into like Bernstein or the Bud Light marketing peeps, but eventually the old axioms are proven to be true.

Was at the Cubs game yesterday with a group of friends, not really baseball fans, mostly couples, but did talk to a lot of fans and most said the exact same thing, they started following the Cubs by watching games on WGN back in the day. WGN was of course free locally or part of basic cable packages across the Midwest, so you had tons of potential eyeballs that could access your product easily, it obviously created a huge fan base, especially when you had Harry making it look like a constant party was going on at Wrigley.

It would seem that eventually you would begin to see a decline in interest in your product as you target an audience that is significantly smaller, and if you are not winning and putting out an entertaining product then why would fans pay to watch a bad team. You begin to create an environment where you are not developing younger fans because they are not going to pay for something they know nothing about, casual fans are not as engaged because they cannot access the product freely and have no interest in paying for the product, you limit yourself to a small group of engaged fans, if your the Yankees or Dodgers you do ok, if you are a small market team you could quickly find yourself in trouble.

Same thing with the Braves and TBS, only more so because the entire southeast outside of Hotlanta was bereft of MLB until the 90's while the Braves were part of everyone's basic cable package. Recall being in Florida around the time the Marlins had just won their first World Series and Braves fans still far outnumbered Marlins fans (in informal surveys of locals I knew). Everyone had grown up with the Braves + the Braves were still wining at the time.

Still seems the gaming entities have a tremendous interest in making sure live game coverage is readily accessible, people must build up faith or interest in local players or they are not gonna fall for the Justin Fields over 200 yards passing prop as a part of their parlay.

This also seems the most enlogical fate for local sports talk radio and your already see a heavy gaming sponsorship influence locally.

Quite interesting that for years you heard Heavenly Bodies commercials almost every break on WSCR and now you get the gaming stuff, kind of a like Uncle Terry's Manometer, gives you what dudes are interested in at the time.

If you could get gambling at Heavenly Bodies...

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Listen man, I know you love, respect and envy Trump and His Children (esp. Don Jr), but ESPN wouldn't be better off if its personalities loved and envied Trump and His Children (esp Don Jr) as much as you do. There are greater forces at work. No?

A new kid joins the sandbox....who is Don Jr?

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“How do you get to be president and you’re stupid?” Donald J Trump - 4/10/25
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus. - Turkish Proverb